For the most part, school is back in session. This means that many people have had to adjust their daily schedules. Parents need to pick up and drop off children at school or the bus stop, or at least get them ready for the bus to pick them up. College students are now getting up earlier, at least some of the time. Teachers are now back on normal schedules, and some people are heading to work earlier to avoid school buses and heavier traffic. I know that I am.

What does this mean? This means you need to start testing your email campaigns for time of day sending so that you are engaging with your subscribers when they are checking their email, which can change.

When schedules change, a person who opened your emails at 10 am in the summer may now start checking emails at 8 am because he or she has to get up earlier. Remember that you are competing with competitors and other emails in your recipients’ inbox. You want your email to show up near the top of the list when they check their email so that they can take action.

If you want to improve your campaigns, you need to test time of day, subject lines and also content. One thing that you can do is to look at when people are opening emails. Of course you will have a large spike when you initially send the email, but you can look for spikes hours after the send, and you can try testing at those times. You can use Excel and PivotCharts to easily find this data (opens by time). If you are an iContact Premier client, your advisor can provide a report for you.

We worked with a client that was able to increase opens by 66% (from 12% to 18%) by changing their send time from early morning to later in the evening.

In the chart below, you will see an email that was sent at 5 am. There is nice peak at around 9 am that tells us that we should try an email send at that time to see if we can get more overall opens.

Have you tested time of day settings, or do you have any questions? Let me know in the comments.